On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 20:28:23 +0000 (UTC) "Dan Drake" dd@dandrake.com wrote:
These lines could be sorted by the submitter ot the change, turning the faceless entities into something resembling people. At present, of course, if an edit looks like vandalism, one can check User Contributions to see if that's the user's pattern of behavior; but having the user's edits grouped together in this way would encourage looking at them together, which would automatically bring out any patterns.
I already submitted something similar to Sourceforge Feature Requests a few weeks ago: A recent changes sorted by author.
I think its use would especially be in case a newbie or IP address was doing good work - check 1 or 2, and then go on to the next person. Even checking on the regulars could be done reasonably fast that way.
Further: a list of recent edits by randomly selected anons & newbies could be a sort of alternate watchlist. When I've made my daily check that the articles I know about haven't been crapped on, I click on the alternate list, and see what a few random new editors are doing. Somebody else clicks and gets a different list. If a bunch of people did this, we'd have a much improved spotting of new vandals, misguided flaming newbies, and astoundingly good new contributors. It could feed into some kind of mentoring, as advocated by Ed Poor.
One that I have thought of (with others at nl:): Give edits a 'trust' value. It starts low (say 0) for newbies, higher (say 1) for regulars and even higher (say 1.5) for sysops. When a regular or sysop watches the change, its trust value is heightened, with a cap at some maximal value (say 2).
Then allow people to get a list of badly-trusted changes. This way we can make it easier to have check-ups cover all messages instead of this one not being checked and that one five times.
Andre Engels